We decided that we would render our animation out in Mental Ray in Production Quality but turning on some additional features. The features are Raytracing, Global Illumination and Caustics. We chose to render all this out in High Definition 720HD. That equates to a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels. Due to choosing these high quality render settings we had to make sure that we leave enough time for rendering. We did some test renders also using final gathering which gives even more realistic lighting conditions. However it also dramatically increases render times. We did a couple of test renders of our outside street scene and the render times for one frame were usually about 15-20 minutes. This can be seen in the screenshot below.

Upon completing this test render we decided we would only use final gathering on the smaller indoor scenes where we would see a real benefit from final gathering. E.g. The reflective surfaces in the kitchen etc. But not on our intensive outdoor scenes where the benefit of final gathering wouldn’t outweigh the increased time for rendering.

Here is a HD rendered image of our character Ernest holding a glass half full of water. This is seen in our first character based scene. Small details like having water physically in the cup was felt by the group to be important in capturing our audiences attention.

Today we began recording narration for our animation in the production studio today. When we returned to our personal computers we found for some reason the some of the narration clips had dropped out while recording. This means that we have to return to the production studio to re-record our narration for Ernest along with completing our narration for our opening and closing scenes and the narration for Emma on another day.

– We burnt a DVD containing all our files. Upon trying to open the files there was a problem because the version of Maya we had used to create the files was different from the version installed on the University computers.